Okay, I know there's a bunch of other discussions about cables elsewhere, but I'm looking for any info or recommendations about flat speaker wire. I can't put wire thru the walls and I'd rather not use stands for my soon-to-be-purchased QS4's.

I'd really like to be able to paint over said wires to 'hide' any trace of them - the room will be repainted soon anyway. Does anybody have any experience with this? Any thoughts as to a brand and/or model of wire I should be looking at? Any help would be much appreciated...

Rob

P.S. I'm neither a trust fund kid nor a union dockworker so I'd like to keep the cost of this to under $5 a foot...

Whatever fits your budget and aesthetic sense would be fine. There's not much reason to spend a lot of money for even your fronts, let alone a surround speaker that won't be getting much signal anyway.

Monster has a flat wire that's reasonably priced, but if you check your local Radio Shack or Home Depot, there may be something even cheaper...Monster wires and cables are about 30% more expensive than comparable brands.

Something else you might consider is getting dirt-cheap wire and running it through a length of plastic tubing on the wall, then painting over the tube. Home Depot carries these tubes, which include an adhesive backing, specifically for wiring purposes such as speaker mounting. Again, you're looking at just a few bucks, and once painted over they blend in nicely with walls.

Here are a couple of "micro-flat" cables that fit the bill.
The first is an IXOS cable; the second is an Acoustic Research cable that you can buy at Best Buy (listed as sixth and eighth entries in Best Buy link).

Are your floors carpeted? It's pretty easy to hide speaker wire under carpet. You just have to pull it up enough to see the spike boards holding them down. Wedge the cable between the wall and the spike board and push the carpet back down. I've got Cat5 running all over my house this way.

Yes, it's all carpeted, but there's a doorway in the way on one side, so it might be tough to run the wire under that (?) I'm a new homeowner, and have zero experience with this sort of thing.

I checked out some of that super-thin AR wire @ Best Buy (AP1850MF) at $40 for 50 feet; that looks like it would be perfect. My gut tells me I'd be giving up some acoustics in using something so flimsy; but with some of the other posts on this board it sounds like I need not worry.